Star-Spangled Schlemiel

By Austin Grossman

Published: March 17, 2007

''WHERE were you when Captain America died?'' asked Marvel Comics, straining to earn its recently assassinated superhero a place in the national imagination on par with John F. Kennedy.

And then all last week, reverent faux obituaries sprang up throughout the news media, from all sides of the political spectrum -- as though all along we'd been following Captain America's every illustrated move, always looking to him for inspiration, as if he hadn't been these past couple of decades just an above-average seat-filler on the Avengers superhero team.

I'll admit to being a Captain America fan, and in mourning. But the fact is Cap was never the most popular of superheroes, even among Marvel devotees. He wasn't up there with Superman, never had Spiderman's movie clout or even the X-Men's. Cap's popularity hovered in the middle ranges, with Thor and Aquaman and Roger Rabbit.

The Captain was a propaganda stunt from the get-go: a former art student, Steve Rogers, finds himself pumped up with a super-soldier formula, dressed up in stars and stripes, and sent out to the front lines of World War II to boost morale. The 1941 cover of ''Captain America Comics No. 1'' shows him, with that big letter ''A'' on his forehead, punching out Hitler. It's hard to escape the feeling that someone was trying too hard.

His story lacked the resonant psychological depth of Batman's or Superman's origin, that mythic alchemy that makes a superhero concept jell. Compared with the cr? de la superhuman cr?, Captain America was more like the guy on a street corner dressed as a hot dog. Trapped in a branding exercise, he literally wrapped himself in the flag, red, white and blue painted onto chain mail, like a super-patriotic Renaissance Fair attendee.

In death, Captain America's been given back to the marketing department -- everyone acting as though he's Uncle Sam, murdered before our eyes, when what he'd become over the years was something much more interesting.

It takes a lot for a mid-level superhero to keep going -- up there on the store shelves every month, decade after decade, punching people out, aging out of context into an increasingly whimsical universe, trying to make it work. He never got promoted to, say, Major America or Colonel America. His shield was a gift, not from a god or alien visitor, but from F.D.R. For all his trouble, he got frozen in ice, fought his own clone and was reduced at times to playing pitchman for Twinkies.

Though he never ascended to icon status, at least Steve Rogers wasn't the stiff, nationalist bully you'd expect. He was a surprisingly likable, even troubled guy I find it hard to be too cynical about.

During the Watergate scandal he had a crisis of conscience and changed his name to the Nomad. He formed a partnership with the Falcon, the first African-American superhero. In his final adventure, he rebelled against a Superhuman Registration Act to license heroes in a kind of super-D.M.V. The man struggled, visibly and with great effort, to do what he saw as the decent thing.

Captain America's failure to hack it as a national icon, to stay a cardboard cut-out, made him a compelling multilayered character. But, in a sense, it's also what killed him.

Superman has his mythic quality and billion-dollar brand, and you knew, during the much-publicized ''Death of Superman'' story in the '90s, that he was always going to come back. But I cringed to see Cap take those bullets, panel by panel, a vulnerable man in a flag suit.

It doesn't matter if it's just a P.R. stunt, or if it turns out a robot duplicate was killed in his place, or another Steve Rogers reappears from some alternative future dimension. In the end, Captain America was never the eternal symbol -- he was the publicity stunt who grew on the page into a failed but likable human being, and was therefore believably mortal. The Captain's co-creator, Joe Simon, is said to be sitting shiva for him.

Making the late Captain America the legend he never was in life, or trying to read into his demise some allegory for our country's current crises, misses the point. Behind that vibranium shield, behind that kitschy Fourth of July mask, Steve Rogers was still just this art student who got drafted into a special assignment that lasted 65 years.

So, sure, Superman has plenty of fans, but I prefer my superheroes like Cap: earthbound, struggling and all too human.